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Transposons catalyzed the evolution of pregnancy

Aurelie and I delighted to contribute to exciting work led by Vinny Lynch at U of Chicago unravelling the genomic evolution of mammalian pregnancy. Paper is out at Cell Reports [PDF].

Ed talks at CSHL meeting in Puerto Rico

Ed has promised to stay away from Pina Colada until he delivers his talk 'Endogenous retroviruses facilitate the evolution of gene regulatory networks encoding immune defenses' [collaborative work with Nels Elde].

Danger danger! Volatile evolution of lncRNAs!

Congrats to Aurelie for her immense contribution to our review article on lncRNA evolution featured on the cover of the October 2014 issue of TIGS.

Mauro Ortiz visits us from Brazil

We are very pleased to host Mauro de Freitas Ortiz, a visiting graduate student from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil. Mauro is carrying his dissertation under the mentorship of Dr. Elgion Loreto, who has been studying the evolutionary genetics of Drosophila transposable elements for more than two decades with a strong focus on horizontal transfer. Mauro was awarded a fellowship from the Brazilian government to train for nine months in the lab. He is carrying a systematic assessment of the rate of horizontal transposon transfer in various mammal lineages.

Julia and Clay rotate in the lab

This month we welcome two new MB rotation students in the lab:

Julia Carleton, who grew up and studied in Portland, Oregon. Julia's rotation project is to annotate DNA transposons in Biomphalaria glabrata, a freshwater snail that is an intermediate host for Schistosoma parasitic trematodes. Almost nothing is known about mobile elements in molluscs so we are curious to see what lurks in this genome. This work is part of a large collaborative effort led by Pat Minx at The Genome Institute of Wash U.

Clay Carey comes from Humboldt, California. During this rotation, Clay will contribute to another transposon annotation project: that of the micronuclear (germline) genome of the model ciliate Tetrahymena thermophila. This genome project is led by Bob Coyne at the J. Craig Venter Institute. A unique feat of ciliates is that their single cell harbor two nuclei: a micronucleus (MIC) which is a transcriptionally silenced "sexual" germline genome, and a macronucleus (MAC) which is a derived, simplified, and edited version of the MIC that serves all somatic cellular functions. All transposon sequences are thought to be removed from the MIC during its transition to MAC. However only the MIC genome has been analyzed thus far, so we don't actually know much about the amount and type of transposons hiding in the MIC. Surely Clay's work will tell us a lot more soon!

Clay is also a talented nature photographer, make sure to take a peek at his amazing photos here.

Keystone symposium 'Mobile Genetic Elements and Genome Evolution'

This international meeting will draw speakers and participants studying a wide range of organisms, systems, and questions.

The list of invited speakers can be found here. There will also be many short talks selected upon abstract, two special workshops (themes to be determined based on abstracts) and of course poster sessions.